Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with
limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off
compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site
without styles and JavaScript.

Volume 568 Issue 7753, 25 April 2019

Caught in the act

The cover shows the inside of the water shield surrounding the XENON1T dark-matter detector at the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L’Aquila in Italy. In this week’s issue, the XENON Collaboration reveals that the set-up has recorded a type of nuclear decay that is particularly hard to detect. The team has directly observed two-neutrino double electron capture in xenon-124, the half-life of which is roughly a trillion times the age of the Universe. The XENON1T detector contains 3.2 tonnes of ultra-pure xenon, and allowed the researchers to detect the X-rays emitted when xenon-124 decays into tellurium-124. They measured the half-life of this decay to be 1.8 × 10^22 years, which is in line with predictions. The team says that this detection is a useful step on the road to detecting neutrinoless double electron capture processes, which could provide a deeper understanding of the neutrino.

Futures

Research

News & Views

A detector that was designed to probe dark matter, the ‘missing’ mass in the Universe, has seen an elusive nuclear decay called two-neutrino double electron capture — with implications for nuclear and particle physics.

Ammonia is vital to society, but its manufacture is energy intensive, has a large carbon footprint and requires high initial capital outlays. An intriguing reaction now suggests that energy-efficient alternatives are possible.

A brain–computer interface device synthesizes speech using the neural signals that control lip, tongue, larynx and jaw movements, and could be a stepping stone to restoring speech function in individuals unable to speak.

Crosslinked polymer networks known as thermoset plastics have many applications, but can’t be reshaped or recycled. A thermoset with reorganizable crosslinks retains its useful properties, but has recyclability built in.

Understanding the behaviour of the machines powered by artificial intelligence that increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic and political interactions is essential to our ability to control the actions of these intelligent machines, reap their benefits and minimize their harms.

The known species repertoire of the collective human gut microbiota is substantially expanded with the discovery of 1,952 uncultured bacterial species that greatly improve classification of understudied African and South American samples.

Draft prokaryotic genomes from faecal metagenomes of diverse human populations enrich our understanding of the human gut microbiome by identifying over two thousand new species-level taxa that have numerous disease associations.

In a screen of 324 human cancer cell lines and utilising a systematic target prioritization framework, the Werner syndrome ATP-dependent helicase is shown to be a synthetic lethal target in tumours from multiple cancer types with microsatellite instability, providing a new target for cancer drug development.

Fiona M. Behan

, Francesco Iorio

, Gabriele Picco

, Emanuel Gonçalves

, Charlotte M. Beaver

, Giorgia Migliardi

, Rita Santos

, Yanhua Rao

, Francesco Sassi

, Marika Pinnelli

, Rizwan Ansari

, Sarah Harper

, David Adam Jackson

, Rebecca McRae

, Rachel Pooley

, Piers Wilkinson

, Dieudonne van der Meer

, David Dow

, Carolyn Buser-Doepner

, Andrea Bertotti

, Livio Trusolino

, Euan A. Stronach

, Julio Saez-Rodriguez

, Kosuke Yusa

& Mathew J. Garnett

Letters

Highly sensitive measurements of the atmosphere of Mars with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter do not detect any methane over a range of latitudes in both hemispheres, in contrast to previous local or remote detections.

Using data from plasma-based tokamak nuclear reactors in the US and Europe, a machine-learning approach based on deep neural networks is taught to forecast disruptions, even those in machines on which the algorithm was not trained.

Multinucleated osteoclasts required for normal bone development and tooth eruption in the mouse originate from embryonic erythro-myeloid progenitors and are maintained after birth by fusion with circulating monocytes.

Geometrically defined microenvironments are used to show that leukocytes migrate along chemokine gradients using the nucleus as a mechanical gauge to sample potential paths and identify the path of least resistance.

Depletion of the DNA helicase WRN induced double-stranded DNA breaks, and promoted apoptosis and cell cycle arrest selectively in cancers with microsatellite instability, indicating that WRN is a promising drug target for the treatment of these cancers.

The stress-activated kinase p38γ has a role in regulating entry into the cell cycle; in the liver, it can induce cellular proliferation during regeneration and promote the development of hepatocellular carcinoma.

The structure of human ATP-citrate lyase, in complex with a newly developed small-molecule inhibitor, shows extensive conformational changes that reveal an allosteric site for the inhibitor to bind and indirectly compete with the citrate substrate.

Crystal structures of ATP citrate lyase from bacteria, archaea and humans unravel how the enzyme directs the formation of the central metabolite acetyl-CoA, and shed light onto the evolutionary origins of the Krebs cycle.